Tom, as you know, pro-liberty conservatives, let alone libertarians, have always dissented from the Lincoln Religion. Here is Murray on the brains of National Review, Frank S. Meyer: "Until the end of his life he insisted on pursuing the unswerving goal of repealing the New Deal system root and branch, in fact, to repeal most of the accretions of statism in American life since the Civil War. Meyer's famous bitter critiques of Abraham Lincoln were not simply exercises in antiquarian disputation, nor of course were they defenses of racism and slavery. [20] Meyer saw clearly that the changes Lincoln wrought in American society were the decisive shift toward the centralizing and despotic nation-state, changes that were built upon by the Progressive era, by Woodrow Wilson, and finally by the New Deal. To Meyer, the goal of a truly principled conservative movement was to repeal all that, and to establish a just polity." Read the whole article, and see footnote 20.
